WoW – More fun together!

Two Healing, Take 2

So just before the nerfs there was a lot of whining and complaining about two healing versus three healing 10 mans. I came down on the “Three heal it and make the dps work, darnit” side. It’s the crotchety side. I’m getting in practice. Only about 50 years before I’m on a porch yelling at those darn kids, after all.

Then they nerfed Firelands and…. well… 3 healing is boring. Boring boring boring. Ok it’s still nice on Baleroc and Bethtilac but Shannox? Ryolith? Alys? Even Staghelm? Meh. And I’d be willing to two heal the others. Ragnaros, yes, is tough but we started two healing two weeks ago to try to boost our raw damage output and guess what, we can do it. It’s insane and my mana goes away and people have to avoid bad stuff but it’s fun.

So… what do we do? Sometimes people are lucky enough to have a real swing healer who is as passionate about her Shadow or Balance or Ret or Ele spec as her heal spec. We’re not one of those groups. We have three passionate healers, each of whom has a dps offspec. Each of which says “um…. I guess I could go dps for this fight” and then puts out 10k and (in my case) manages to die spectacularly to something we would have easily seen in heals. Or gets distracted by healing frames and just has to stop and toss out a heal! Darnit! Because that’s what we do!

Look, this is how boring three healing is. Kerick said in Firelands last week “I’m going ret, you don’t need me”.

o.O

So really we need one of us to be better at dps. But then again, healing is such a delicate role; what happens if I designated one of us as the dps person, she gears up and gets good, and then 4.3 drops and we need three healers again? What if she’s rusty, or heaven forbid prefers dps?

This always happens, as the raid gets more geared and better at fights. There’s less and less need for the third healer. The nerfs just sort of sped the process up. But it is a real dilemna.

Takeaway? Healers are whiny little punks. Take away one of our partners too soon we whine. Make our job too easy we whine. Stand in crap, we whine. Don’t stand in crap, we get bored and whine.

Well, if the priest goes shadow we get spell haste. If you go boomkin, we get spell crit. If I go ret we get … nothing because we already have a ret pally. :p

j/k. If you want, I can gem and enchant my dps set. I did ok the other night, but if I get it properly arranged, it will make a big difference. They want me to l2ret on Van anyway, so I may as well get to it. Well, Sorak does at least. Not sure why, since I’m the only one that heals him.

I’m the healer that generally goes DPS when we two heal something. I don’t usually mind because:
a) I think it’s fun to run around as a giant fluffy chicken sometimes,
b) it fills me with pride when I can match or beat main-spec DPSers in my off-spec,
c) I love having the opportunity to use the DPS gear I’ve acquired, and
d) It feels good to bring extra utility and flexibility to my raid team.

However, I do NOT want to have to go DPS all the time. With the nerfs we don’t need three healers for most fights on normal, so I was fearful that I would end up as DPS all the time. Thankfully we got Ragnaros down quickly on normal and are now working on hard modes, and we still feel like we need three healers for those. Which is good because there’s a huge difference between being asked to go DPS occasionally or for one specific fight (Alysrazor) and another thing entirely to be asked to turn my off-spec into my main-spec.

Both the other healers on my team feel a little guilty about how I always switch to DPS so they’ve picked up DPS specs and have spent time gearing them up. But now I feel a bit guilty whenever they offer to switch so that I can continue healing. I know that neither of them want to be DPSing either.

Blizzard said that this was the first round of nerfs too, so God knows what it will be like if they nerf the content even more. Can you imagine? We’d probably end up one-healing normals and facing the two-healing dilemma on heroics as well… 😦

That sounds good except that when you two heal something it is usually ok to have that extra dpser be weak. If you have a really hard fight that has to be three healed it is a pretty big liability if your third healer is only so-so and reluctant to heal. For progression raiding you really need three healers that know their stuff cold.

I disagree. We can go round and round on the merits of 2 vs 3 healing – but I’d rather have someone who can push high DPS, but maybe isn’t as great healing – than the other way around. When we needed a 3rd healer, we just needed them for a specific phase – or to cover something like helping to top off the raid.

In the end it’s a personal choice, and a guild choice. I don’t think either method is “wrong” – or even “less right”. Having fun and killing bosses is the right answer.

This week we wound up 2-healing Baleroc, Alysrazor, Rhyolith, Domo, and Ragnaros and it went just one. All of those were one-shots with the exception of Rag.

Healers were under some tense pressure near the end of Domo but otherwise it was fine, and it really helped to speed up the night. I’m a fan of less healers, though sometimes our healers grumble about it. 🙂

One of the perks of moving to a 25-man guild (which I’m not a fan of, otherwise) is never having to DPS. Out of 6 healers *someone* always wants to DPS so I’m off the hook.

We would’ve had pretty big problems in my old guild… since me and the priest were heals/heals and the paladin was heals/tank. (The priest would sometimes go shadow, but we only needed her once a month or something.)

Personally, I realized long ago that I’m a crap boomkin… shit dps, hugging fires and the lot. I’d give it a shot for the good of the guild, but I’d really, REALLY hope someone else can respec.